Playing with Historical Fact and Fiction by Anne Louise Bannon

There’s a story told that back in the early 1920s, when Will H. Hays first arrived in Hollywood to clean up the movie business, a bunch of producers and studio executives treated Mr. Hays to a dinner party at the opulent Coconut Grove nightclub in the recently opened Ambassador Hotel. Near the end of the party, Mr. Hays gave a speech thanking everyone for such a warm, sober welcome. The catch? Almost everyone in the party had been drinking very heavily and most were pretty hammered.

But is the story true? And as a writer of historical mysteries, it’s my job to decide whether I think it is or, more interestingly, whether I think it matters.

Hays, by the way, is the man who lent his name to the Motion Picture Production Code that up until the late 1960s profoundly influenced what and how much sexy stuff was seen on movie screens in America.

So, did Hays really commend a bunch of drunk studio execs on their sobriety? I don’t know. My husband, a film historian, told me the story, which he remembered from reading a memoir by someone in the business during the time. Assuming my husband’s memory is correct about what he read (which it usually is), the story is still suspect. By the time it appeared in the book, it was several decades old and a personal memory, at that.

And if it did happen, it’s entirely possible that Hays’ remarks were more ironic than not. After all, before he went to Hollywood, Hays was a member of President Warren G. Harding’s administration and that crew was known to hit the sauce pretty hard. It’s hard to imagine that Will Hays did not notice that all those teapots on the tables at the Coconut Grove did not contain tea. It was well known that you could get any libation you wanted at the nightclub, and liquor was frequently served in teapots during the 1920s and Prohibition.

While I did not get to use this particular story in my latest Freddie and Kathy novel, The Last Witnesses, it’s the sort of story I love using as background for the series, which takes place during the Roaring Twenties. Freddie ends up staying at the Ambassador in this latest book and dines with studio executives at the Coconut Grove, which is why I was thinking about Hays.

There are times when I’m pretty strict about sticking to the historical fact of a given  setting. Such as the reality that the early moguls were probably making more money on their real estate holdings in Southern California than they were on the movies they made. I want to be sure that the cars Freddie drives are the right models for the story, that he and Kathy are wearing the right kinds of clothes, that what buildings were where is described accurately, that you hear the roar of typewriters in a typing pool. These are the details that can bring an era alive and make history real, not to mention shed some light on what it was like during a given time.

But I have been known to play with historical fact here and there to good effect. I’d heard third-hand from a friend about his father’s friend, who during the ‘20s, used to fly tequila into Los Angeles in his old Sopwith Camel. Do I know it as a fact? No, but when I allude to it in the second Freddie and Kathy novel, Bring Into Bondage, I don’t need it to be a fact. It’s not an unlikely happenstance for the time and in the circumstances of the story, it doesn’t have to be right factually.

The bottom line is that I’m writing fiction, not history. I need the history to be mostly accurate to create the scene well. I’ve noticed that in those stories where the creator takes the time and care to get the historical details right, she or he usually also makes sure to get the other details, such as plot and characterization, right, too. I also need to get as much right as possible so that I can get away with alluding to possibly apocryphal stories, like Hays’ address to the studio execs, which may not be factual, but expose a certain truth about an era.

As I said, I didn’t actually use that particular story in The Last Witnesses – I had others that worked better for the plot. But I might eventually. Maybe in another Freddie and Kathy story. Maybe in another series. It’s still a good story. And sometimes the story is better for a novel than the fact. Not often, but sometimes.

How Not To Do Your Historical Research--Or Marry The Historian First by Anne Louise Bannon

Way back, when I first started my historical research for my novel Fascinating Rhythm, the project seemed fairly straightforward. The novel is set in 1924, so lots of pictures, movies, books, all from that period, all still fairly accessible, never mind that when I started the project, the Internet as we know it wasn’t up and running yet. Also, I’d just gotten a Master of Arts degree in theatre, with a minor in theatre history, so I knew how to do research.

But as I’ve since discovered, I could have done better. Researching an era for a novel is different that researching a historical period for an academic paper. But what I thought I could blow off turned out to be more important than I thought.

Being relatively fresh from my degree was great, in that I was able to take advantage of our university library and also called a history professor for some added pointers. I made lots of photocopies of newspapers – ads from the era gave me a very clear idea of what things cost and classifieds helped me figure out how much my heroine probably made a week. Magazines gave me a sense of the clothes of the era, but not much of the colors. Biographies and near histories, such as Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday and Stanley Walker’s The Nightclub Era, helped give me a feel for the attitudes and issues.

I was so excited. I was getting the fun of the research without having to do footnotes or bibliographies.

And that was the first thing I did really wrong. I kept lousy notes and didn’t track my sources very well. I never wrote down the name of that professor who tipped me off to Only Yesterday. A trip to New York City, where the novel is set, led me to a book of floorplans of various buildings, but I didn’t copy the bibliographic info. Not only was I not able to give that nice professor due credit in my acknowledgements, I can’t go back to many of the sources I used to continue my research for the sequels.

And mostly, I wish I’d built a better relationship with reference librarians, historians and archivists. Fascinating Rhythm was written, I went on to marry Michael Holland, who now works as the archivist for the City of Los Angeles. He’s got mundane documents that open a window into a time or remind us just how little things have changed. For example, he’s got letters from Keystone Studios to the Board of Park Commissioners in which the studio complains that they’ve been banned from using Echo Park for filming because the studio had trashed it too many times while shooting some of the silent movies we know and love. And better yet, I called him just now to find out that was exactly what he had. Thanks to him, I have even more sources that will make it even easier to research orange growing in Southern California and other things for my third novel in this series, stuff that Google can’t find because it’s not on the Internet.

You have no idea how much easier these folks make research, even with the Internet. Having a historian in house is even better. You see, long after

Will it make a better novel? I don’t know yet. I do know that I’ve now got some bits of information that will help beef up the plot of Bring Into Bondage, the sequel to Fascinating Rhythm. And I’ve learned something else about doing research – you’re never done. But that’s fine with me. Even with taking notes and keeping better track of my sources, research for a novel is still a heck of a lot of fun.

Anne Louise Bannon is the author of Fascinating Rhythm. A journalist and blogger, her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Ladies’ Home Journal and in newspapers across the country. In addition to her novels, she writes the romantic fiction serial WhiteHouseRhapsody.com, and wine education blog OddBallGrape.com, with her husband, Michael Holland.